1. Introduction

About Ecological Sites

The U.S. Department of Agriculture Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS) defines ecological sites as “a distinctive kind of land with specific physical characteristics that differs from other kinds of land in its ability to produce a distinctive kind and amount of vegetation” (USDA–NRCS, 2006). Ecological sites determine not only the ecological potential of a site, but also how a site can respond to natural disturbance and management actions. Ecological sites have been delineated for many areas using physical and biotic features and are linked to soil map units. Soils, climate, hydrology, geology, physiographic features, plants species occurrences, plant community composition, annual biomass production, and plant-wildlife interactions all contribute to the proerties of ecological sites. Ecological Site Descriptions (ESDs) describe the underlying factors associated with a specific ecological site, as well as different ecological states within a given site based on factors such as grazing, fire, drought, and other management actions. For an example of an ESD, see EDIT Jornada.

Ecological Site Summary

Using ecological monitoring data, the overall status of an Ecological Site can be summarized into an Ecological Site Summary (ESS). At the site level, ecological site summaries generated from monitoring data can tell us about the condition and health of ecological sites based on indicators such as cover by structure and functional group, species dominance, species occurrences, canopy gap measurements, and soil stability measurements. These indicators can help inform the user of the ecological state of a given plot or overall site (i.e. shrubland state vs. grassland state). Identifying the ecological state allows us to not only determine the degree of departure from the corresponding reference ecological states, but also to inform management and restoration actions accordingly by determining the best pathway to a less degraded state. For more on state and transition models (STMs), see see Bestelmeyer et al., 2017. A major data source for developing these summaries is the Assessment, Inventory, and Monitoring (AIM) Program along with the Landscape Monitoring Framework (LMF). AIM and LMF include almost 25,000 plots throughout the western United States (see AIM Data Portal) stored in the Terrestrial AIM Database (TerrADat). Data garnered from AIM and LMF plots is both generalizable and scalable and thus applicable to management decisions across multiple disciplines at both local and national levels.

ESS Tool

An Ecological Site Summary (ESS) tool has been developed to help users visualize the overall status of their region of interest within a specific ecological site, or across an ecological site group. This information can be summarized within a given administrative state or across political boundaries for landscape scale analysis. Ecological site summaries are generated using an R Markdown script with an interactive HTML output in which users can query summary tables, download full or filtered summary tables to view in Excel, explore interactive figures, and download static figures for their own use.

This report is an automated process and can be continually updated as new data becomes available each year or as lines of inquiry shift. This ESS information can be included in decision making processes for BLM managers, as it can help inform land use plans, grazing permit renewals, shrub or invasive species treatments, and/or seed menu development for ecological restoration and reclamation.

2. Interpreting report figures

This report uses both boxplots and mean values with confidence intervals to summarize cover value. Boxplots can be a helpful to look at the distribution of the underlying data including the presence of outliers. Confidence intervals are a measure of variability and indicate how certain we can be of our estimates.

Boxplot

Intepretting a Box Plot. Modified from: https://www.wellbeingatschool.org.nz/information-sheet/understanding-and-interpreting-box-plots (accessed 22 Aug 2019)

Confidence Intervals

Intertpreting Confidence Intervals

For more information on interpreting confidence intervals see the presentation from Project Leads Training 2020 PowerPoint here and presentation here.

3. Where are the data coming from?

Plot Map

Below is a map of all AIM and LMF plots within the Piceance-East Douglas HMA used for this report. Plots are colored by ecological site as well as year sampled.